How to Get Data Through WebRequest

The ASP.NET "WebRequest" control opens a Web page and retrieves information about the page from the host server. You use this control to scrape data from a website, extract information and display it on your application. The website can be an external public page or an internal website within a company intranet. WebRequest works with WebResponse to store the data in an ASP.NET variable.

Instructions

1. Click the Windows "Start" button and type "visual studio" in the text box. Press "Enter" to open the Visual Studio software. Open your ASP.NET project.

2. Double-click the Web form in Solution Explorer. Double-clicking a form displays the form in the Visual Studio designer. Right-click the form and click "View Code."

3. Create the "WebRequest" control. The WebRequest class requires a website to which the application connects. The following code connects to a website named "mydomain.com":

   WebRequest website = WebRequest.Create ("http://mydomain.com");

4. Get the response from the website and assign the response to a "WebResponse" control. The following code shows you how to retrieve the response from the website:

   WebResponse server = website.GetResponse ();

5. Display the response. The data from the website stores in the "server" variable in step four. The following code shows you how to display the server response:

   Stream sitedata = server.GetResponseStream ();

   StreamReader stream = new StreamReader (sitedata);

   string serverdata = stream.ReadToEnd ();

   Console.WriteLine (serverdata);

References

• Microsoft: Request Data Using the WebRequest Class